Criminal Heaven - Fairly Good, Based on 2 Critics

AllMusic - 80Based on rating 8/10

80

When We Are Serenades' Adam Olenius and Markus Krunegard first got together to write songs, they knew that as a pair of songwriters used to running the show in their old bands, they would need some set of rules to guide them. With this in mind, the two created a kind of creative dogma for themselves to follow, demanding that the music be positive and bombastic, and that the pair should both be singing at all times. It's through this set of pop rules that we have their debut album, Criminal Heaven, which finds them delivering a set of sugary sweet and carefully thought out pop gems that perfectly capture the feelings the band sought to create with their self-imposed restrictions.

I was raised as an American in an environment where, for reasons still largely unknown to me, British accents were touted as inherently classier or more intelligent than mine. A result of that subliminal teaching, I tend to think anything coming to the States from overseas is preferable to all my home-grown stuff, especially music. As a fan of metal, I’ve always thought that Sweden had us beat.